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Letters The Easter Vigil
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The Catholic Telegraph
March 28, 2002The Easter Vigil is the high point and center of the Church’s liturgy. In this long ceremony of watchfulness and reflection and waiting, all the themes that we have been hearing and reflecting on during the season of Lent are brought to their clearest enunciation and their final expression. The first seven readings give us a reprise of the Old Testament history of salvation and of its orientation to a new covenant, a new set of blessings. The gospel narrative of the resurrection brings us to the conclusion of what we have been experiencing together during Holy Week. After the gospel will come baptism and the other rites of initiation, toward which the elect have been moving during these weeks and from which those who are already members of the Church receive orientation for their ongoing life of grace.
The reading from Romans combines several of these themes. It is a reflection on salvation (which we have heard a lot about during Lent in the second readings), placing it in the context of baptism and of Jesus’ death and rising to new life. It has been suggested, in fact, that this reading ties the whole vigil together and enunciates its meaning, expressing in words what the lights and the bells express in symbol.
Paul has been telling the Romans how salvation has overcome human sinfulness and that, although sin has been pervasive and powerful in human history, grace and salvation have "overflowed all the more" (5.20). Now he addresses a potential objection: if salvation has been greater than sin, does it follow that we should continue to sin so that salvation can be still more abundant?
This is where our reading begins. It is a rather rambling and repetitious treatment of the relationship between sin and salvation which Paul explains by drawing a parallel between baptism and the death and resurrection of Jesus. It’s helpful to remember that, when Paul speaks of baptism, what he has in mind is adults being baptized by immersion, by being pushed fully under the water which thus becomes a kind of tomb for the one being baptized.
Baptism, Paul says, is a kind of death that unites us to Christ’s death. But if we are united to Christ’s death, we are also connected with His resurrection. When we come out of the water, we have a new kind of life in us just as Jesus did when He came out of the tomb.
Our sharing in Christ’s death through baptism releases us from our connection with sin since dead people are no longer inclined to or involved in sin.
Paul now repeats: if we have died with Christ (through baptism) we will live with Christ. Just as Christ won’t die any more, neither will we. Jesus’ death broke the dominion of sin in human affairs. He is no longer involved in the world of human sinfulness as He had been during His earthly life. His life is totally in God. Because of our association with Christ, what applies to Him also applies to us, including victory over the power of sin.
This weighty reading does not invite us to conclude that, once baptized, we are no longer able to sin, nor that sinning doesn’t make any difference once we have come to share Christ’s life. Its point is that sinning doesn’t make sense any more. Because we have shared the death and rising of Jesus through baptism, the self-seeking and false independence of sin are simply imappropriate and alien to us. We’ve got other things to give meaning and direction to our lives, namely, the life of the risen Christ. Sin is part of our past, part of what we left behind when we died with Christ.
In the course of teaching the Romans why salvation doesn’t constitute an invitation to keep on sinning, Paul also manages to enunciate a triple connection between the death and rising of Jesus, salvation, and entering and coming out of the waters of baptism. (Scholars point out that this is the longest treatment of baptism in all of Paul’s letters.) All three realities come together in a kind of dynamic heavenly convergence. Being baptized, sharing the life of Christ, and being saved all happen at the same time. Each involves and reflects the other two.
All three are involved with the annual Easter Vigil. All three are constitutive of the life of each Christian believer. Our Christian life is based on our being saved which consists in sharing the life of Christ which has its origin in us through the waters of baptism. Baptism incorporates us into the life of the risen Christ which makes us holy, justified, saved. Because we share Christ’s death and resurrection through baptism, we participate in the salvation that He came to bring. Through this triple exercise of God’s re-creating power we receive the source of our Christian life, the pattern for its development, the initial stage of the goal toward which it is directed. It all fits together.
Easter is not just concerned with something that happened to Jesus a long time ago. It’s also concerned with something that is still going on in us now.
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Conversation Questions.
How do I see sin as inappropriate and alien my life?
What does living Christ’s risen life mean to me?
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